Mind vs. Consciousness and other things

This week I have been in a weird headspace of the meta physical and philosophical variety. There are a lot of streams of media that I have consumed that have lead me down this path of brain dumping.

It is difficult to ignore when the universe is literally throwing you a direction that you weren’t expecting to go. It all starts with one thing, but little by little small whispers become loud screams impossible to ignore.

What started it all

There has been a lot of hype recently surrounding the Joe Rogan podcast featuring Elon Musk. If you have three hours and a strange curiosity as to what the hype is all about, I highly encourage you to listen.

In the podcast, what I feel was glossed over, is the fact that there were a lot of philosophical and ethical thoughts that could be pulled out in regards to technology and the possible future of science. Musk argues that we have realized the idea that mankind will eventually become androids. How? He states that we are attached to our phones. The part of our mind that does computing without hesitation in which we’ve come to rely on as our second brain. Since it isn’t fully integrated into who we are, there is a bit of lag so the only obstacle is to lessen the lag and open the stream of communication from a small stream to a full blown river.

…..and this is what started me down a rabbit hole.

Does the mind create consciousness or is consciousness pre-existing

By Wednesday, I was drawn to another unrelated podcast called The Model Health Show.

You can probably guess by the title where this is going. On the heels of the Rogan podcast, my mind naturally gravitated towards this episode. Its almost as if a hunger had begun in my brain and it needed nutrients.

I never thought alternative of the way that we had been taught to think in regards to the brain and consciousness. The idea that our minds create the experience that we live doesn’t seem that hard to grasp. We choose what we want to see and acknowledge subconsciously and that is ultimately our individual human experience.

But what if the mind just experiences consciousness instead of creating it. What if consciousness can exist outside of the human brain and we, in our arrogant nature, choose to believe that we have control?

In this episode the reference an experiment where scientist conduct a brain swap on salamanders. During this process the salamander was able to continue habits formed previous to brain swapping, meaning it retained memories.

WTF?!?!

If that wasn’t hard enough to come to grips with, Shawn Stevenson and Mark Gober dive deeply into the idea that the mind is manifesting particles and matter to appear solid and shape our human experience. This is to say that we are essentially clouds of chemical reactions walking around, but because the mind shapes our experience, we see physical beings and solid matter.

Current headspace

After taking all of this in, it is hard to think of myself as a huge part of the world. It is hard to see how we hold the value of celebrity so highly when we are small particles in a ginormous microcosm of things.

This is the headspace where great things come for me. When I am not fully connected to one plain of existence, I feel like I can grab ideas from a collective conscious to help relate it to others.